Restoring Communities within the Context of the Metropolis: Neighborhood Revitalization at the Millennium.

Coulton, Claudia J.

This paper examines trends that have contributed to the changing awareness and understanding of poverty and community in the United States. It also describes and comments on the recent amalgam of place-based and people-based approaches known as comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) and community building that have grown up as a result of the new conceptions of urban poverty. The recent devolution of federal government responsibility has called on states and localities to develop new capacity to replace former programs and to enhance community control. A number of individual approaches to reducing poverty in city neighborhoods has been used, but as these approaches fall from favor for various reasons, the community development movement has been emerging. A relatively recent approach to restoring poor communities is CCIs and community building. CCIs are neighborhood-based efforts that assume that neighborhood transformation depends on developing capacity at the neighborhood level to define and effect responses to local needs on a sustained basis. Several principles drive most CCIs. They are usually designed to be resident-driven, comprehensive, collaborative, asset oriented, and sustainable. The extent to which these goals and principles can adequately address urban problems is not yet known. It is apparent that current efforts to restore poor communities through CCIs are not large enough to address the problems of cities. A national agenda to rebuild inner cities must bring substantially more resources to bear. (Contains 155 endnotes.) (SLD)